No wonder Floridians have turned against AlGore:
November 16, 2000
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Florida's Political Swamp
Legal maneuvering aside, the real question in Florida was whether any of this would get resolved before pure politics overwhelmed and strangled everything in sight. From where we're sitting it appears that the vote down there is disappearing into the Florida swamps.
Yesterday, we prematurely praised the courage of Democratic County Judge Robert Lee for voting against a complete manual recount of Broward County's 588,000 votes. Judge Lee cast the deciding vote on the county's three-member election commission after a sample recount of Democratic precincts added a mere six votes to Al Gore's total. Judge Lee has now suddenly reversed his vote, and Broward will do a full count. The Los Angeles Times headline explained it best: "Broward Judge Feeling Heat From Political Machine."
Democrats were furious with Mr. Lee. The Times quotes Robin Rohapaugh, an aide to Democratic Rep. Peter Deutsch, who has been watching the judge closely: "He has a reputation as a fair judge, but his votes haven't helped us."Looks like somebody got to Judge Lee. He's helping now.
Columnist Robert Novak reports that for Democrats the Broward vote totals have become "the focus for turning apparent defeat into glorious victory." Their strategy is to claim that thousands of Broward voters, mostly senior citizens, didn't apply sufficient pressure on punch cards to record their vote.
As to the recounts themselves, any Florida county is free to come up with its own recount standards to divine the intent of voters. This obviously is an incentive to the kind of subjective chaos TV viewers everywhere witnessed last Saturday night, as the Palm Beach County election commission changed its standards for counting ballots twice during the night.
Yesterday Republicans accused Palm Beach's now-famous county commissioner, Carol Roberts, of physically abusing ballots during the recount to produce de-chadded Gore votes. She said she was "fair and impartial." The notion that Ms. Roberts is actually counting any ballots, insofar as the day before she was shouting to a crowd of Democratic demonstrators that she was willing to go to jail for the Gore effort, is at the least amusing.
Meanwhile, circuit court judge Jorge Labarga ruled yesterday that local officials are free to count "dimpled chad" ballots as valid if they want to. Those are ballots that are only indented, with the chad still fully attached to the ballot. "No vote is to be declared invalid or void if there was a clear intention of the voter." Which of course depends on the meaning of the word "clear" to the local county canvassers.
As to Judge Lee's flip-flop, he claims he was moved to reconsider his stance on a hand recount by citing an advisory opinion issued Tuesday by Democratic Attorney General Bob Butterworth, the chair of the state's Gore campaign. But Mr. Butterworth's own office Web page states he will not issue advisory opinions on matters under the jurisdiction of other state agencies: "Questions arising under the Florida Election Code should be directed to the Division of Elections." Now Mr. Butterworth insists he can issue opinions "on anything I want to."
He also apparently feels he can try to influence local officials in charge of counting votes. The St. Petersburg Times reports that last Thursday, Mr. Butterworth got one of his aides to call County Judge Michael McDermott, chair of the Volusia County elections board. The three men then held a conference call in which the Attorney General told the judge he should do a hand recount.
Judge McDermott objected and said to Mr. Butterworth, "I think you should disqualify yourself from this matter." Shortly thereafter, Mr. Butterworth left the conference call, but his aide continued to lobby the judge to do a hand count. Judge McDermott said the call was improper and says "it will probably be the last" time he speaks with the attorney general. Nonetheless, two hours after the call the Volusia County board voted to conduct a hand count.
Attorneys who have worked for previous attorneys general say Mr. Butterworth probably violated his own office's "Government in the Sunshine" manual. It states that Florida's Sunshine law is violated if one official's involvement in "quasi-judicial proceedings raises a presumption that the contact was prejudicial to the decision-making process."
To recap: a) we have a county judge intimidated into reversing his decision on a vote count based on an improper opinion from an attorney general who chaired the Gore campaign; b) that same attorney general has been caught trying to influence an elections board; c) counties are hiring $7 an hour temporary workers to help with a recount that will be subjective, standardless and surely sloppy.
There is a silver lining. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, en banc, to hear the Bush campaign's arguments to halt the manual recounts. Whatever the outcome of that decision, there is now a string running from Florida into the higher levels of the federal courts. We suspect that if the appeals court judges keep pulling on that string to take a close look, someone's house of cards may come tumbling down.
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